Scouring Old Car Classified Magazines Show Cheap Unexpected Treasures from the Past

Let me paint a picture that I think many of us might have been a part of at one point or another. We’re sitting in the living room with an older family member who is also a fan of cars. Let’s just say it’s an uncle for this particular purpose. Suddenly, this uncle throws on an auto auction show on TV, and we hear the famous words, “I had one just like that,” come out of his mouth. The car that he had one of just so happens to be fetching a six-figure price tag as we see a look of frustration and regret come across his face.

The thing about predicting which particular cars are going to be worth a ton of money in the future is that it’s definitely easier said than done. In fact, it’s more of an art than science to figure out which machines are going to build value over time instead of just taking up space in your garage until they’re eventually sent to the junkyard.

This time, we check out that exact scenario unfolding, but instead of our old uncle, it’s the cars that those who are in their 30s grew up with.

Our host at Donut takes the time to pick up a couple of old classified magazines like Auto Trader and scours the pages, looking for cars that are incredibly valuable today that might’ve been seen as just cheap old junk back then.

The crazy part about this whole thing is that we aren’t quite sure which part is wilder – the fact that nobody expected some of these cars to skyrocket in price to where they are today or the fact that we used to actually use magazines to figure out what sort of cars we wanted to buy.

In any case, the video below delivers the ultimate dose of nostalgia and maybe gives some folks a little bit of regret along the way as well.